The War on the Koch Brothers

Yesterday’s New York Times headlined: “New Democratic Strategy Goes After Koch Brothers.” Anyone who follows the political scene can only respond to that headline with hollow laughter. The Democrats’ “new strategy”? Most of the emails that I have received from the Democrats in recent years have used the Koch brothers as a fundraising foil. But the Times tells us that the anti-Koch campaign has just now been inaugurated by Harry »

Harry Reid delivered another salvo against the Koch brothers on the floor of the Senate today. On reading it, the reaction of any normal person would be that he has gone off his meds. That a Senate Majority Leader should indulge such crazed vituperation against a couple of private citizens, on the floor of the Senate, dramatizes how low our democracy has fallen. I won’t reproduce the whole rant, but »

Once upon a time we had the House Un-American Activities Committee. Most people, certainly most Democrats, would call that an ugly chapter in our history. But those who were called “un-American” during the 1950s were (or were believed to be) traitors in the pay of a hostile power. Calling them “un-American” was not such a stretch. Since then, the term has gone entirely out of fashion. Can you imagine the »

The disgraceful Harry Reid, one of America’s most corrupt politicians, a man who has mysteriously gotten rich as a public employee, is losing his grip. This has been going on for a while; remember his insane claim during the 2012 presidential campaign that Mitt Romney doesn’t pay any taxes? Today the subject was Obamacare. Reid, probably because he sees his position as majority leader slipping away on account of popular »

The Democrats are agitating to raise the minimum wage, unemployment be damned. That was the point of this tweet by Harry Reid, earlier today: Reid’s tweet is dumb on any number of levels: 1) The economy has been far from uniform over recent decades; it is particularly during the seven years during which Reid has been Majority Leader of the Senate that middle-class Americans have suffered. Reid, of course, takes »

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial titled “The Koch Party” raises once again the question whether the paper’s editorial board has been hijacked by Democratic Underground: Only a few weeks into this midterm election year, the right-wing political zeppelin is fully inflated with secret cash and is firing malicious falsehoods at supporters of health care reform. Remember the good old days when people called the Times the “Gray Lady”? Now it’s »

Democrats facing the voters in competitive states are not too crazy about the ad below customized to run in their states. The version of the ad below stars Senator Kay Hagan, running reelection in North Carolina. The Democrats and their foremost media adjunct fret that “many [vulnerable Democrats] lack the resources to fight back in the early stages of the midterm campaign.” The pity elicited by the Times requires catharsis, »

How does a member of the mainstream media report on the bizarre spectacle of Rachel Maddow’s latest attack on the Koch brothers? John lucidly exposed Maddow’s attack as a bizarre piece of fiction in “Rachel Maddow is crazy, too.” One of the virtues of John’s post is that one comes away with a deeper understanding of important phenomena: MSNBC, a certified left-wing media star (Maddow), the Democrats’ war on the »

MSNBC has had a hard time lately. The network fired Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin for craziness, on-air and off-air respectively. Melissa Harris-Perry was forced to apologize, first on Twitter and then, tearfully, on the air, for making political hay out of Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson. The network put Ed Schulz out to pasture, and most people wrote Chris Matthews off as a hysteric long ago, so that pretty much »

The Left’s obsession with Charles and David Koch continues unabated. Today’s exhibit: this New York Times article on a press conference by California campaign finance officials on a fine that they levied against an Arizona group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights. For the Times, the Kochs are the story; the article is headlined, “Group Linked to Kochs Admits to Campaign Finance Violations.” The violation occurred in connection with »

The Left’s hatred for conservatives has become so obsessive that it is hard to engage a liberal in rational discussion of any public policy issue. Take the Keystone XL pipeline: I think it is obviously a good idea, but if a liberal wants to argue to the contrary, fine. But instead of trying to advance a rational argument, what do liberals do? They can’t talk about the pipeline except by »

Joe Romm, who some environmentalists have called the Joe McCarthy of the climate campaign, has a brilliant satire up right now at ClimateProgress.org (the climate desk of the Center for American Progress). I can’t do any better than to just let you take in the Swiftian brilliance of his piece entitled, “Will Breaking Bad Have a ‘Koch Brothers Ending?’” (I swear, I’m not making this up.) With the finale of »

When Koch Industries announced that it was looking into buying the Tribune Company and its portfolio of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and others, lots of conservatives (like me) got excited. Imagine if Koch owned seven or eight major newspapers, and installed new, more conservative management! Liberals, on the other hand, were horrified. The Hartford City Council went so far as to pass a resolution opposing »

John Hinderaker called out Dick Durbin for his stupidity in “Is Dick Durbin the dumbest Democrat?” Recognizing the intensity of the competition for the laurels, John left the question open, but he found Durbin definitely to be in the running. But Durbin is worse than stupid. He is a bully and a thug. As John recounted, Durbin has been sending out letters to anyone he has determined to have funded »

The competition is intense, but Durbin is definitely a contender. Here is the latest evidence: In preparation for a previously announced hearing on controversial “stand your ground” laws announced after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to more than 300 possible corporate backers of the American Legislative Exchange Council, requesting their position on such policies in states »

We have demolished a lot of dopey leftists over the years, but my personal favorite might be Contango Confusion, an April 2011 post in which I deconstructed a very silly article at Think Progress by cub reporter Lee Fang. Fang wrote an article titled “The Contango Game” without, it turned out, having any idea what the word “contango” means. Readers joined in on the ridicule; if you need a day »